I had a cheap, older, well-maintained 24 row Deere.  That thing caused us incredible amounts of suffering and downtime.  Possibly the worst machinery purchase ever here.  Had a 12 row Deere prior to that which was a pretty good machine and did a lot of work without much fuss.  

Vac vs. finger matters when you have many different grades of seed.  If you can order and take delivery of very consistent seed size and fine-tune the finger pickup to it, then no doubt finger pickup can achieve excellent results.  Can't just dump 38 pound corn in one field and 61 pound corn in the next and achieve 99.5%+ singulation all day long like Esets, new Deere vac meters, or 1200 CIH meters.